Good Monday!
It’s hard to believe we’re halfway through the year. It seems like January was a decade ago.
ICYMI: My good friend Trey Lowman joined us on Vernacular to talk about race, friendship, and more. Josh Goldman and I also broke down the first episode of Breaking Bad’s Season 4 over on Breaking Pod.
One Big Thing: The New Iconoclasm
The Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. The statue was paid for by the wages of former slaves, and was finished in 1876. (Photo Credit: The WSJ)
Statues have been in the news lately. I have no intention of writing on the statue du jour—whether or not whatever statue is in today’s dialogue should or should not be removed (except St. Junipero Serra…he stays). If you’ve come for hot takes on your favorite founding father, you won’t find them here. But let’s talk about how statue destruction is the new iconoclasm.
For millennia, fanaticism was the province of religious zealots—even the Latin root of the word, fanum, means "temple". One might have thought that modernity—which has tried to sideline the worship of God, relegating it to the territory of pious pew-bound social conservatives on Sunday morning—would usher in a concomitant age of peace, devoid of all fanaticism. But the twentieth century showed us that the most devastating conflicts and social projects were borne not from religious but from atheistic fanaticism (e.g. communism and fascism). This was perhaps nowhere more apparent than the Eastern Front of World War II, where Stalin’s Bolshevik Red Army eventually crushed Hitler’s Fascist Wehrmacht in a brutal war of attrition that cost around 30 million lives. Perhaps it was a harbinger of things to come.
Now, anthropocentric sociopolitical activities that focus on purging the past, present, and future of all offensive artifacts (i.e. what the Romans called damnatio memoriae) have become the new socially acceptable, perhaps even required, fanaticism. This of course is not to claim that statue toppling is always bad; nor is it a logical argument for the position that statue toppling is even sometimes bad. But it is an assertion that the cause célèbre—whatever statue, policy, tweet, comment, position, symbol, etc. is on the wrong side of history and needs to be destroyed—is pursued with a zeal borne of a fundamentally religious impulse.
I was on a listserv discussion a few weeks ago in which several fellow graduates of my alma mater were advocating for the removal of a prominent statue of Cecil Rhodes (it’s not a new discussion; calls for the removal have been ongoing since the birth of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town). I shared my thoughts with a couple of friends from Oxford, and one of them, Nathan Pinkoski, responded to me with this bit of brilliance (emphasis mine):
I increasingly think that secularism is a fiction, at least insofar as we speak of the decline of what anthropologists would characterize as 'religious' practice. What we see are displaced theological concepts, which is an entirely different affair. But it is one our hegemonic liberal thinking is ill-equipped to handle, because it was convinced theology would be and should be privatized. Following the end of the Second World War, the only major shock this liberal position received was the shock of May 1968, which disclosed a spiritual crisis within liberal regimes over the subject of materialism. ... Now as to the Great Awokening, we're facing something similar to what the post-1945 generation faced in May 68, but our postwar liberal thinking (this time, our post Cold War liberal thinking) is even more ill-equipped, because theology is supposed to be privatized and withering away (sure, 9/11 spooked us, but the point was just to double down on the virtues of secularism). As in May '68, the new theology of the present captures hold of liberal concepts and institutions, transforming their meaning in completely different directions. And it wins mass support, partly because of the abstractions that have grown up around the 1960s in the US, but partly because our public piety has become so displaced from real theological referents.
Nathan is absolutely right. And because he’s smarter than me, he’s already thought through a lot of these questions and written about them, including the very interesting piece below.
The Strange Rise of Bourgeois Bolshevism by Nathan Pinkoski (Law & Liberty)
As the specific struggle of the 1960s became more of a memory, however, the moral passion became increasingly abstract. The generations that missed the sixties turned the civil rights era into a readily applicable analogy to all other fights against inequality . . . Then there came the call for equalizing ethnicities new to American soil with older ethnicities; then equalizing sexual orientations; and now in the 21st century, equalizing gender identities. For their enthusiasts, each of these struggles—always a struggle on behalf of a “minority”—replicates the moral crusades of the 1960s.
And on my specific claim that today’s statue toppling is the new iconoclasm, see first Wikipedia’s definition of iconoclasm: the social belief in the importance of the destruction of icons and other images or monuments, most frequently for religious or political reasons. Historically, iconoclasm has taken place in a more or less exclusively religious context. (Even the Roman damnatio memoriae campaigns were based on a quasi-theistic framework wherein the governor was God; the most secular iconoclasm was probably that of the French Revolution.)
Today’s exhibitions of indignation toward inanimate likenesses are, at root, no different from previous iconoclast movements. The following piece, by Wilfred McClay, gets at this idea as well. The piece is worth reading in its entirety, even though I disagree with it at points—especially its defense of the character of Jefferson.
Of Statues and Symbolic Murder by Wilfred McClay (First Things)
It’s this paragraph that caught my eye, because it illustrates the fervor of the movement in explicitly religious terms:
Second, that a great many of the foot soldiers in this movement are young, white, suburban, middle-class and college-educated; and that they are working out their salvation with fear and trembling and a deadly earnestness. The “white privilege” of which these young people complain is a projection onto others of the very condition that they suspect and fear in themselves. Hence the convulsive rage, complete with copious gutter profanity, which we have all seen in videos of them. People in the grip of such powerful psychological forces will go a long way to expiate for their existential sins and rid themselves of their demons.
That’s enough on statues. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
One bad take and one good response.
The Bad Take: How Racist was Flannery O’Connor? by Paul Elie (The New Yorker)
The Response: How Flannery Fought Racism by Jessica Hooten Wilson (First Things)
Sally and I are huge Flannery fans. I’ve appreciated Paul Elie’s work (especially on Reinhold Niebuhr), but this one misses the mark in a big way. Aside from employing the loaded question fallacy (e.g. When did you stop beating your wife?), Elie displays a poor understanding of Flannery’s work and the nature of grace in the Christian soul. Elie presumes that Flannery was racist, despite the fact that almost every single one of her short stories rails against racism and portrays racist characters colliding with violent, transforming grace.
Elie’s crucial evidence for Flannery’s racism? I wish I was kidding—it’s private letters in which Flannery acknowledged to a friend that she struggles against racism despite knowing that it’s wrong. In other words, Flannery says that her nature struggles to accept what she knows is right. She acknowledges that she is in need of grace.
As I read Elie’s summary of the short story Revelation, I was frustrated by his interpretation of Mrs. Turpin’s heavenly vision as one that reifies segregation. That’s absurd. Dr. Wilson’s whole response to Elie’s article is fantastic, but her rebuttal to that specific interpretation bears repeating:
As the sun sets, Mrs. Turpin receives a vision at her pig pen. She beholds a bridge extending from the earth “through a field of living fire.” She sees a congregation of souls dancing and leaping in a great heavenward procession—both “white trash” and black people in white robes. Mrs. Turpin observes that those like herself and her husband Claud trail at the end of the line. Elie interprets this as a vision of segregation—people separated by race and class even while processing to heaven. But O’Connor is actually alluding to the biblical teaching that the first will be made last and the last first. The vision puts Ruby Turpin in her place, so to speak, as she watches small-minded “virtues”—her “dignity” and “common sense and respectable behavior”—being “burned away” in the purgatorial fires. After this revelation, Mrs. Turpin literally steps “down” from where she stands and descends the “slow way” back home.
TL;DR—Flannery is still the 🐐.
One Sad Thing.
Breonna Taylor and a Family’s Fight for Justice by Jordan Ritter Conn (The Ringer)
“George Floyd” is justifiably a household name now in America; “Breonna Taylor” is known to many but not to enough. In this long piece, Jordan Ritter Conn dives into her killing when—more than two months before George Floyd’s murder—police officers executed a no-notice, no-knock warrant at her house for a crime in which she was not a suspect.
And then, early on the morning of March 13, 26 years and 282 days after she was born, police entered her home and killed her. She was asleep when the police arrived. She had violated no laws. She was not the target of any investigation. She lay in bed with her boyfriend, then dozed off while watching a movie, until police broke down her door and shot her eight times.
If that doesn’t outrage you, I don’t know what will. Also worth exploring: The Ringer’s Press Box podcast did an interview with Conn, which is worth your time.
Thank you so much for the incredible response to The Vernaculist! We now have hundreds of subscribers and are so excited about the work ahead. If you like the content, please consider sharing with some friends!
I’m also grateful to several readers for sending along interesting articles they found this week, and am always interested in your submissions for future installments. You can email me directly or click the button below.
Afterwords
Thanks so much to this week’s new subscribers! I value your feedback and try to acknowledge every email I receive either through email or in the newsletter.
Special thanks to Nate S. this week for recommending the podcast Seeing White, and to Casey C. for passing along some recommendations for further reading/listening on race issues.
Have a great week!
-zac